Chapter 4 #2
Marigold had already decided to retrieve it for her, even though the hat would be hard to reach—it wavered just below the corner of the boathouse, buoyed up by a raft of lake algae.
And the algae looked odd, rippling in the shadow of the building, not fresh green like the specimens they had fished out of the lake to study under microscopes in freshman biology—Ethyl Rautencranz would no doubt remember the precise taxonomic name for the water plant.
But a longer look showed the algae that clung to the corner post of the boathouse was not colorless, even in the shadow. Because the oscillating plume was not algae but hair.
A woman’s hair.
Long, dark auburn hair that wafted below the surface of the water, where Marigold could now make out the unmistakable shape of a long puffed sleeve and a bare white wrist.
Some echo of recognition—the memory of another girl, drowned under the waves of Salem sound—scoured through her like acid.
“Aggie!”
Marigold had already dropped her bicycle and was jumping, splashing into the shallows, sinking up to her waist as she plunged forward. Her wool skirts quickly became saturated, weighing her down as she struggled against the binding of the fabric wrapping around her legs. “Aggie!”
She plunged her arms under the water to reach for the girl, trying in vain to keep her head above water to see through the shadows. Finally, she caught up the fabric of the sleeve.
Somewhere at the edge of her hearing, Marigold heard footfalls.
“Help me!” she called frantically. “Help me, please!” But her voice sounded weak and feeble against the lap of the water and the rush of the wind—and her own fearful panic.
She strained to raise her head and her voice enough to shout. “Help!”
She caught hold of the girl’s clothing with two hands and heaved back as hard as she might, trying to bring the poor thing to the surface, desperate to try and help. Desperate to be in time.
Against the soft crush of the fabric in her hands, the girl was cold, heavy, and stiff. “Aggie!” Marigold slipped deeper into the water, her feet sinking into the shifting sand on the bottom as she grappled her arms under the poor girl’s shoulders. “Help me!”
“What—” came an aborted call from a railing overhead. “What are you doing?”
“Help me!” Marigold’s cry took on a sharp edge. “Help me get her out!”
Footsteps rolled and echoed over the wooden dock. “What are you doing to her?”
“I’m not—” Marigold tried to get her breath, but the chill of the water and the cold of the sodden clothing under her hands, left her gasping. “I’m trying— Please help me get her out!”
“Hurry!” someone called from a different direction. “Into the boat!”
It took moments of Marigold struggling in vain to make any sort of progress before the unseen voices came back.
“Oh, my God!” someone cried from the water a few feet away, where the bow of a rowing barge had just nosed out of the boathouse bay.
“Mind your oars,” demanded another, somehow more familiar voice, before the rest of the boat appeared, and she too gasped. “Lordy! Is she dead?”
“I don’t know,” Marigold gritted out, even as the logical part of her brain told her the opposite—that there was no hope.
“I can’t find out if you don’t help me!” She levered her feet as best she could against the piling and pulled one more time—and heard the dampened sound of the slow rending of fabric.
And all of a sudden, she was overbalanced and had toppled backward under the water as the girl’s skirts at last floated free.
It was only a moment before she came up gasping and scrambling to find her footing, to see a line of girls in a boat staring down at her. And at what could only now be called the body in her hands, which was threatening to sink anew.
“Catch hold. You, Ruth,” came the order from the boat. “And bow oar, reverse, to put us back in.”
The aforementioned Ruth dutifully clasped Marigold’s hand as she clung to the side, towing Marigold and the lifeless girl to the dock inside the bay, where reluctant hands finally reached down to help her out of the water.
Marigold heaved herself onto the edge of the dock to catch her breath, still clasping a puffed velvet sleeve, lest the poor stiff girl sink under again. But it was clear from the way the girls on the dock had shuffled back that she would get little if no help from them.
Because the young woman was clearly dead.
Even in the dim, mottled light of the boat bay, her skin was eerily pale—faint blue veins spiderwebbed over chalky white, and her expressionless, flat eyes stared unblinkingly into the dark rafters.
In the water, the young woman’s auburn hair had streamed out like a fan, but against the sodden wool of Marigold’s lap, it was a tangled into a lifeless mat.
And she was a young woman, of an age with the Wellesley undergraduates who now surrounded her. But she was not Aggie Newton.
“Thank God.” Marigold muttered her relief before she gathered her strength and heaved against the wet weight again, pulling the poor girl’s shoulders clear enough to drag her stiffened corpse onto the planks. “Please, if someone would get her feet?”
“Lordy, I’ll do it.” That take-charge, braver soul knelt down to take hold of the beautifully made, low-heeled half-boots—Marigold noted with an eye for fashion, though the boots were terribly scuffed—levering the lower half of the young woman’s torso out of the water.
“Is she dead?” someone behind Marigold asked.
“Lordy, she looks it, doesn’t she, with the rigor mortis and all.” The familiar, take-charge voice belonged to Ethyl, who, thankfully, seemed less overwhelmed than the others. “You’ll know better than us.”
The poor girl did indeed look dead. “I’m afraid …” Fear and frustration made a hideous muddle in Marigold’s middle. The sheer, awful helplessness rose like a tide within her.
But there was nothing she could do. Nothing she had learned that might help. Even in this modern day and age, in this progressive place of learning, full of the most brilliant minds and inventions, there was nothing she knew how to do to revive the poor soul.
“I’m afraid so,” she finally finished, forcing herself to think logically. “But we had still best send for Doctor Barker. To make sure.”
“Ruth, you go,” Ethyl, who was still kneeling at the dead girl’s feet, directed. “You’re the fastest.”
“Oh, yes!” Ruth was clearly glad of something to do other than stare at a dead woman. “I’ll fetch her.”
“And Mr. Griffin, the driver, if he’s there. Or Mr. Duckett, if you would,” Marigold added. The handyman would be a practical addition. “With some transport. And President Irvine ought to be notified, don’t you think?”
“Lordy, yes,” Ethyl seemed to be the only other one capable of clear thought. “Good thinking. Let me help you up. You’re soaked.”
Marigold gratefully took the hand stretched over the dead girl. “Thank you. Not exactly what I envisioned when you invited me down here today.”
“Lordy, no. Golly, but this isn’t much of a welcome.”
“No.” Marigold could only agree.
“Welcome?” A too-familiar voice behind them rose in something approaching the high tones of horror. The other girls stepped back to give the now sportily attired speaker room. “I saw you in the water, choking her. I saw you,” Sarah Appleton accused. “If she’s dead, you’re the one who killed her.”